


We Build These Bridges to Watch Them Burn

by FirebirdRising



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Barbara is just angry, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Nygmobblepot, a narrative from ed's point of view, ed is lost in the no man's land, oswald is beautiful as always
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2019-11-04 02:33:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17889842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirebirdRising/pseuds/FirebirdRising
Summary: In the days following Eduardo's death, Edward realizes three fundamental truths.OR: Edward reflects on his past, rethinks his present, and reimagines his future.





	1. Three Fundamental Truths

**Author's Note:**

> Well, you've made it past the vague summary and onto the main event! This is just a chapter to set everything up. Hope you all enjoy!
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Gotham.

\----

In the hours that followed Eduardo’s death, Ed would realize three fundamental truths. 

The first: they were all doomed. It was out of character for him, to have had such a strong sense of hope prior to the events of tonight. Even when he was squatting in the library he had felt something. He had been certain that Gotham would receive help eventually. Then Eduardo had arrived with his assemblage of soldiers, and suddenly, that hope was gone. 

This led to the second realization, which was that Edward Nygma himself was about to be sacrificed for the concept of “the greater good.” It had happened once already, just a few hours ago, in fact. He had drawn the short straw on Gordon’s rescue mission, dressed up in a bomb squad suit, and walked into the GCPD like the bait he was. Harvey Bullock, in a rare stroke of genius, had solved his riddle, of all people.   
Which brought Edward to his last and final truth: The Riddler and Ed Nygma alike, whoever he was at the moment and whether he admitted it or not, had outlived their usefulness. They were obsolete now in every sense of the word. The GCPD had Lucius- they didn’t need brains. The GCPD had Lee, now- they didn’t need anyone with medical experience. That’s about where Edward’s expertise ended, and heaven knows the current “underworld” didn’t want him, either. 

That’s what happens when you blow up hundreds of innocent people, The Riddler reminded him in the back of his head. Ed grunted in response, earning a glare from a pouting Barbara next to him. 

He was camped out in the basement. Months of dust floated in the lamplight, an eerie scene that reminded Ed of days past- of a boy in a closet studying his way to salvation. 

He was drawn from his trip down memory lane by Barbara, who’s voice screeched like nails on a chalkboard. 

“Are you going to ask what’s wrong, or should I pretend you did?” The blonde woman was as sarcastic as ever as she filed down her nails. Ed had been ignoring her underbreath curses for the past five minutes, assuming she would go away eventually. 

The universe just loved to see him suffer, however, and Barbara remained planted at his makeshift desk. 

Ed pushed his glasses higher on his nose and accepted his fate. “I’m not the best candidate when it comes to empathizing with uneasy partnerships.”

“We’ll you’re about to be,” Barbara assured him, voice growing darker. She stood up and began pacing the floor. Ed listened to the rhythmic click of her heels against the dusty tile. 

“Jim and I have always had a… complicated relationship,” Barbara explained unnecessarily. All of Gotham new of the former couples plight. Quite a tragedy, Ed would have said, had he not shot his almost-lover into a river. “We ended on bad terms, I guess you could say.”

The click, click, click of her heels stopped. Ed looked up. 

“But since the bridges blew, we’ve been working together,” a smirk lit up the psychotic woman’s face. “Closely.”

The Riddler mentally slapped his own forehead. In the material world, Edward settled for rubbing the soreness of his chip-free skull. For the love of….

“I’m pregnant.”

Ed wasted no time in announcing his thoughts of, “Proof of fundamental truth number one,” before standing from his desk and walking up the stairs, Barbara still ranting in the basement.

\----

Oswald came prancing into the GCPD the next morning, clothes immaculate, hair completely tamed.   
Meanwhile, Ed laid haphazardly on Alvarez’s desk, his chip wound bleeding into his greasy hair and the bags under his eyes more like bruises. Oswald spared him a look- one akin almost to pity- which Ed dignified with a small dip of his chin. They weren’t at odds perse, but they certainly weren’t friends, either. 

Besides, he was almost ninety-five percent sure his wound was infected, which meant he was going to have to either talk to Lucius or Lee, or raid the medicine safe himself. This would not have been a problem, usually, but here Ed was in a no man’s land. He hadn’t eaten in days, which was his more hopeful solution to the swimming in his vision. He hoped it wasn't a fever. If it was a fever, then proof of fundamental truth number three was about to commence. 

He could hear Gordon and Penguin bickering in the background. Ed strained to listen, then gave up, instead counting the ceiling tiles above him. There were hundreds of them- all black and dusty and-

Oswald’s face appeared above him. 

To say Edward shrieked was a mercy. 

\-----

The two friends turned enemies, turned uneasy friends again, seemed to float amongst the halls rather than walk. 

It was amazing, how… tired… they were. How tired the entire city was. A darkness had descended upon the world as they knew it, weighing down their shoulders and clouding their thoughts.

Or maybe it was just Ed himself, with his swimming vision and his shaking limbs. He absentmindedly raised a hand to his aching wound. 

Oswald looked at him expressionlessly. “I have doctors that can look at that,” he offered softly.  
Ed faced the other man and offered a nod. The Penguin was nothing without his broad capacity for love. Edward had known people like that before: his mother to name one, who had met her own end before his ninth birthday.

Yet here was Oswald. Alive despite his weakness. Thriving in this purgatory Gotham had become. 

\----

The physician poked and prodded at his head for a solid half an hour before declaring that his wound was indeed infected. 

“What happened?” she kept asking, skeptical of his first answer involving a rabid bird. 

Ed just grunted something akin to long story. The answer “An evil scientist stuck a mind-control chip into my corpse” did not seem to be logical in that moment. 

Five minutes later he was dismissed from the physician’s office, a bottle of red pills clutched in his left hand.

\---

The medicine made him nauseous, or maybe that was just the infection. He spent the next few days curled up on a broken-down couch in the GCPD basement. 

Lucius came down on the third morning, a glass of water in hand. 

“We’re going to have to move out,” Lucius told him. “Eduardo’s alive. He’s coming.”


	2. Chapter 2

Ed is greeted with chaos. He should be used to it by now- he’d lived in Gotham his entire life, after all. But there was just something about the now that made chaos a more tangible thing. It was like, suddenly, the cacophony of movement and sound was a living, breathing entity: one that was not meant to be messed with. 

(Yes, he decided. The medicine was definitely interfering with his brainwaves. He’d never been one for metaphors and philosophical nonsense.Or maybe that was just the now.)

“Eduardo is about five minutes out,” Lucius explained as they jogged toward the captain’s office. “We have our forces around the perimeter of the building, but we’re running low on ammo. Again.” The man spat out the last word like poison. 

“What do I need to do,” was Ed’s only response. Really, what more could he d other than what he’d already done? He’d thrown himself into Eduardo’s forces before in a bomb-proof suit, and still almost died. Now he was in a thinning white shirt with a gash in his head. 

You’re disposable, remember? 

Lucius pushed the office door open with his shoulder. Inside was an assemblage of sleep-deprived people, which also happened to be the only brain cells left in Gotham. 

Jim was as stoic as ever, though his suit jacket was tossed over his chair in the corner, where Lee sat talking to Alvarez. Harvey, who had proven his semi-intelligence during the “bomb incident” was on the other side of the room, nursing what had to be one of the last bottles of alcohol on their island. 

Lucius closed the door behind them. “Let’s get to work.”

\-----

Exactly five minutes later, Eduardo busts down the front doors of the GCPD. He stalks in, his body connected to tubes and wires that make him look more monster than man. 

“Hugo Strange,” Ed mutters under his breath. Lucius, beside him, grunts in acknowledgement. They were wedged between two desks at the top of the precinct, a gun apiece and a single box of ammunition. No bulletproof vests, no bomb suits, and nowhere to run. 

Considering the past few altercations with Eduardo, these odds weren’t terrible. 

Jim stood in the center of the floor below them. He buys them a grand total of fifteen seconds with words, then. Ed watches Jim get seized by the throat by the Eduardo-like thing. There’s a dull thud as the captain collides with the wall, but it can’t be heard over the sea of bullets that had appeared.   
“What’s our job up here, anyway?” Ed yells to Lucius. They were sitting ducks behind these desks. 

Lucius grips his gun tighter. “Stay out of the way, I assume.”

That, Ed could live with. He wasn’t really one to risk his neck if he didn’t have to. Heck, if he had known from what direction Eduardo’s army was coming, he would have run back to his library by now. 

At least he assumed he’d make it that far. His head was fuzzy. Good grief, this gunfire wasn’t helping…

“On your left!”

Ed reacts on impulse, putting a bullet through the head of a nameless soldier. He topples back down the stairs.

Lucius screams something incoherent, and then they’re very much in the way. Ed doesn’t think as he shoots a man between the eyes- the one behind him in the stomach, and the one that follows him in the heart. 

In the now, he’s really upped his body count. 

The next few moments are a blur. Lucius dives behind a collapsed bookshelf, pulling Ed down with him. The bullets of Eduardo’s army blow right through the wood, but at least they can’t be easily seen. 

Lucius yells something about ammunition. Ed shoots a soldier in the knee. There are more now- a sea of ruthless soldiers intent on…

Intent on what, exactly?

One of the soldiers makes a beeline for the captain’s office, Lucius shoots him in the ankle, but he continues forward. Before the scientist can reload his gun, the soldier is in the office. A scream fills Ed’s ears, but not one of terror. 

Then, Barbara Kean is strutting out of the office, guns blazing. It’s still early in her pregnancy, Ed knows, but he can see the slightest rise of her stomach. 

This woman was insane. 

Barbara shoots three men, and then from down below, Eduardo- no, that thing- bellows something through his mask.   
Their adversaries begin retreating, shooting as they run, and then it’s over. 

\----

“They were looking for something,” Jim tells them after they’d tended to their wounded. 

Really, Captain Obvious? Ed wanted to say, but he was… tired. 

The room was spinning- almost rubbery to look at. He put his head between his knees and breathed. 

He didn’t really care what Eduardo and his men had been looking for. This wasn’t his fight. He looked up at Lee wrapped in Jim’s jacket. She was the reason he had stayed in the first place, and she had (almost quite literally) stabbed him in the back. 

Barbara, who was lovingly cleaning her guns, met his eye from across the room. She shrugged, before, regrettably, opening her mouth:

“Well, I say we find out who,” she pointed a finger at Lucius. “You sent someone following them, right?”  
Lucius nodded. 

“Then we go to them before they come back for us.” 

Ed looked up at Jim, who was perched on his desk. This imbecile they called the police captain made all the calls, and by the look on his face, the man was actually considering the idea. 

No. No, no, no. 

Ed stood from his chair and looked out at the precinct. Desks were turned on their sides- makeshift barricades against whatever would attack them next. Everything was broken: the phones, the computers, the people. 

Ed’s breath came faster nowa. He saw the GCPD how it used to be: a place where he had… friends? No, pity. A place where the riddleman could be acknowledged for a few measly seconds. A few seconds of acknowledgement where he had never received them before. 

This place had been his sanctuary, and now it was gone. Nothing in Gotham was the same. 

Nothing is ever going to be the same again. 

He swallowed down bile, tried to calm his breathing. The room was getting smaller. Too many voices behind him… 

“That’s suicide, Barbara!”

“What if we-”

“He’s looking for-”

Chaos. They were falling apart. They were-

“SHUT UP!” Ed swung on his heel, his teeth bared. “SHUT. UP.”

Silence. Oh, sweet, unbridled silence. 

Ed drank it in, and when his vision cleared, they were looking at him. 

There was something satisfying about having three guns trained on him at once: about looks of fear that came with his outburst. The Riddler smiled: a twisted, hysterical expression. 

Still smiling, he turned the handle behind him. His head felt clearer, his vision sharper. He glanced around the room: terror. 

We’re back on the clock. 

\----  
Walking out of the GCPD is something akin to liberation. His legs feel heavy from his apparent infection, but he keeps going. He’s free. 

He’s free, for perhaps the first time in his life. He has no debts, no obligations, no ties. 

He’s just him.

\----

It takes him an hour to realize he didn’t know where he was walking, and until nightfall to accept that he was completely and utterly screwed. 

He cleared his throat. He was standing in the middle of the road… somewhere. He mentally hit himself. Leave it to his softer half to let himself be controlled by elation rather than logic-

“Who’s there? Show yourself!”

Oh, dear. 

Ed instinctively put his hands up. There was a gun in his jacket, a knife at his ankle…

“Step into the light.”

He did as he was told. 

He strained to make out a silhouette: a man, holding something. A child, perhaps. The man took a step forward and into the streetlamp luminance. 

An elderly man- one he had seen somewhere before, was holding a doll. A puppet. 

This city was insane.


	3. Chapter 3

Had the newspaper still printed at the end of the world, Ed could have predicted the headline right there in then. On the front of the Gotham Gazette, his various mugshots in a row, and in big block letters, “THE RIDDLER KILLED BY MAN AND HIS DOLL.”

“Dad would be proud,” he muttered. He palms the gun in his jacket. The man takes a step closer to him. 

And then it hits him. He’d seen this man before- witnessed him with lists and trays and a stuttering fear that came about with a certain Penguin…

“Penn?”

The older man swallowed. There was a beady look in his eye, one Ed previously thought him incapable of. “Hello, Mr. Nygma.”

At least the stutter was still there. The suit was different, the doll was definitely new, but there was a personality trait that remained. He’d like to think he himself had maintained a stable personality after everything. 

Or at least a stable two.

(Years of corners and four identical walls was flashed across his brain. He looked at the apartment building behind him, and the door off the hinges. He suddenly had the need to bolt. He could run inside, if he could make it that far with the throbbing returning to his head.)

Ed stared back into the dim lighting. 

“You’re a long ways from home,” he was stalling now. He took a step backward. Penn followed. 

The old man swallowed. He held up his doll. “Mr. Scarface wanted to meet you.”

Mr. Scarface?

Ed rolled his eyes. So the world ending had taken this poor man’s mind as well. Nothing to see here, then. 

He spun on his heel and began walking… somewhere…. When it happened. 

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you!”

Ed froze in his tracks. Was that… was that the doll?

Hands grabbed him from behind as a cloth was rammed against his mouth and nose. 

I hate this city. 

\-----

When he wakes up, he’s on a couch, and he almost thinks that he’s back in his blackout days. Sitting bolt straight up, he tries to make sense of the blurriness in his vision, of the way the room is spinning too fast for him to make out a damn thing. 

(Honestly, this wasn’t the worst thing since the bridges blew.) 

Ed’s vision clears slowly. He makes out the objects closest to him first: a coffee table, a glass of water, and a dog’s bone on the ground. There’s a scratching of canine claws against the marble floor, and suddenly the animal comes into his vision. 

Edward. 

“I can’t believe you named a dog after me,” Ed muttered, finding his head only pounded more when he spoke. He figured Oswald must have been in the room somewhere, Edward the dog considered. 

Behind him, The Penguin scoffed. “I’m quite fond of that dog, I’ll have you know.”

And that’s how they began. Again. 

\----

“This is Mr. Penn,” Oswald explains the next morning, once Ed had slept off whatever had been forced into his system. He has half a mind to stab the old man, but there’s something about the dummy he’s holding that makes his stomach roll. 

This city was getting weirder by the minute, it seemed. 

Mr. Penn smiles a nervous, flustered expression. “Hello, Mr. Nygma.”

The doll grunts. Ed reaches for the gun in his jacket and clutches it like a vice grip. Apparently, Oswald’s men were tracking Penn, who for some reason was tracking him. 

Oswald puts a hand on his arm to keep him from striking. 

“What are we going to do about them?” Ed half-hopes Oswald says something about mercy, thinking about Haven and the blood already on his hands.

There’s a beat in the conversation, then Oswald sighs. The doll- Scarface, he assumed- spat out a slew of hateful commentary. 

“We do what the rest of Gotham is doing,” The Penguin turned and walked out the door.

Ed’s curiosity was piqued. “And that is?”

An answer from the hallway: sarcastic and twice as angry: “Absolutely nothing.”

\---

It’s nice seeing Olga again. Sure, the old woman had hit him with frying pans on a few occasions, but at least she was a familiar face. 

At least she was still alive. At least he hadn’t blown her up. 

She mutters as she fixes them dinner- a feast of steaks and canned beans. It’s nothing compared to what they enjoyed during their political career, but it sure as hell is more than the GCPD can provide. Ed notes that three bites fills him up completely.

Oswald is staring at him from across the table. Olga takes his wine from his outstretched hand, refills it, and then hands it back. Still muttering, she shuffles out of the cold, marble room. After everything, the woman has still maintained her jovial outlook on life. 

Finally, once they have been alone for a good five minutes without speaking, Oswald breaks the silence. 

“Penn’s gone insane. My told my men that his dummy told him to attack you.” 

Ed watches Oswald’s finger connect the dots.

“Figures.” 

The silence befalls them once more. It’s tense, but not uncomfortable. Ed didn’t know where they stood on the friend-enemy scale at the moment, but at least the scale was weighted more positively than it had been before. 

He’d saved Ed’s life, after all. Twice now. No, Oswald did not want him dead. 

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be used. He had grown accustomed to this routine: the casual trust, the friendship, the usage, and then the disposal. Oswald had a habit of that; spitting people out when he was done with them. 

In all honesty, Ed had been spat out with every relationship he’d ever had. His father. Kristen. Lee. Even Isabella must have had an agenda. 

Oswald clears his throat. Ed jumps out of his thoughts; he’s been holding his knife and fork with a Herculean strength he didn’t know he possessed. 

“I apologize,” he quickly breathes. Then he stands, taking his plate to the kitchen before Olga can return. His head still hurts. 

\-----

Jeremiah Valeska poisons the water a few nights later. As if that isn’t the only thing they have left as a city. 

Oswald is rightfully furious, and had Ed been in his right mind, he would have joined in the yelling. There’s just something about this No Man’s Land that makes him want to scream; to throw a punch at someone he knew he couldn’t take. 

It was that same feeling of recklessness- the knowledge that he was going to die soon along with everyone else- that he knocks on Oswald’s office door. There’s still angry chatter coming from the inside, but only from The Penguin himself. 

Ed waits a moment; knocks again. 

The muttering stops. Staggered footsteps approach the door, before it’s slammed opened. 

“WHAT?”

Ed doesn’t even blink at the sight of Oswald. Murderous with rage, in front of him. He’s used to this man, had conspired with this man. This was child’s play compared to the wars they’d waged against one another. 

“Oswald,” Ed enters without direction. The feared Penguin’s face is already softening. 

Interesting, how after all these years- after all these wars and blood feuds- that Ed still had that effect on his old friend. 

There are three other men in the office: all armed to the teeth. They glare at him as he enters but do not say a word when Penguin dismisses them.   
Ed sits down in front of the fire. Oswald follows suit, and suddenly they’re in the same position as that night. Different couch, same people. Different time, same promise between them. 

I’d do anything for you. 

“Ed?”

He swallows. He can see every line on this man’s face in the firelight- the scars and stress marks the map of his life. 

Do you believe in fate?

Ed sees the piano in his apartment. He sees their sanity certificates framed on the wall of the Van Dahl mansion. He sees countless dinners and campaign speeches. 

He sees the icy waters of the Gotham river mixed with crimson blood. And maybe it’s the pounding in his head, or the fact that the world was on fire, or the realization that he was no longer whole, but Ed takes a step forward after his two dozen steps back. 

He thinks of his father: of whippings and verbal assault and the face of his mother as she struggles to breathe. 

Forget him. 

He thinks of the mirrors in his life. Of all the illusions and psychosis pills that always ceased to work. 

Leave it behind. 

“Oswald,” he begins, finally, after the span of months and years of blood, “I want to begin again.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave a review. Next chapter should be up soon, before the next hiatus hits.


End file.
